Religion

Puh-leeze! Can we come to our senses when it comes to the proposed Islamic Cultural Center near Ground Zero?

The arguments being made against it by Newt Gingrich, Sarah Palin, Rudy Giuliani and other political cheap-shot experts are absurd.

First, they insist, this is “hallowed ground.” No, it’s not. The mosque would not be built at Ground Zero, but two blocks away — on a busy commercial street. Two blocks from Ground Zero today, you can already find a strip club, an off-track betting parlor, a McDonald’s and Burger King, an Irish pub, pizza joint and Dunkin’ Donuts. They’re OK and a mosque is not? Puh-leeze!

The ongoing imbroglio over the construction of a mosque on private property in lower Manhattan has proven two things: 1. Cable news has something to get it through the doldrums of August, and 2. The Republican Party will use even the U.S. Constitution as a weapon of hate.

For President Obama, there is no vacation from vacillation.

By the time he got to the beach this weekend, the controversy over his Friday speech seemingly supporting the proposed mosque at the 9/11 site left him so rattled, he could hardly wait to put on his flip-flops.

Even the hastily arranged Gulf vacation itself was more of a placation, as in placating those who complained his family time off had not included the BP-besieged Gulf shores, making his ringing words of support ring hollow.

Regarding the president's comments about the Muslim center and mosque near the site of 9/11, let’s have some straight talk about exactly what is happening.

Obviously this latest example of the president's instinct to say whatever is on his mind, despite the damage it does to Democrats running for reelection, was damaging to Democrats.

But whether one believes the president was intrinsically right or wrong (I believe he was right) and politically smart or stupid (I believe it was stupid), the larger truth of this important matter is the open appeal to racism, bigotry and fear by a vocal minority of Republicans.

In his blog entry of Aug. 3, Armstrong Williams writes, "The Boston Tea Party, in which colonists dumped the usuriously taxed products of Britain into the Boston Harbor, was an act of defiance inspired by Christ’s repudiation of the money-changers."

This is a stretch or, if true, is a serious misunderstanding — at least on the part of the first Tea Partiers — of the event described in all four Gospels.

If we fast-forward a couple of millennia or so to the birth of the American nation, we once again see the influence of Christ as a central tenet in the political equation.

Many of the early European settlers in this land were willing to uproot themselves from their homes in hope of finding a place in which they could practice their religion without interference from the government. In 16th-century Europe the Church had become wealthy and corrupt, and was in bed with the monarchies in wielding political power. Established religion had ceased to be a source of liberty and was used to enslave the masses.

The Clinton presidency was an aftermath, a time of building, growing and consolidating, like the prosperous times that follow a revolution.

In Israel, there was investment and building but there had been no revolution. There was gradual progress to an advancing scale, but there was no one moment you could call back to as you would in the Taoist parable of enlightenment: Before the revolution we cut wood and carried water. After the revolution we did the same. But we were different then. There was no Nelson at Trafalgar to mark a day. No Washington at Yorktown, no Crockett at the Alamo. No David. In my adult life the only one who approached even folk status was the brave Arab who rose to his bullet as confidently as a songbird rises to greet the dawn, Anwar El Sadat. But I have felt for a long time that it is just ahead for Israel and its definitive moment will come in the next 20 years, and possibly very soon.

Full disclosure: I'm not Catholic, practicing or otherwise. This South Carolinian from the Bible Belt was raised more along Protestant lines.

But Catholic and Protestant alike believe in and serve a living God. Still, I am well aware of the major importance and influence the Catholic Church wields in this country, and the role it must and should play as this nation plunges headlong into the 21st century. Read more...

Helen Thomas is either willfully ignorant or just an out-and-out bigot.

Facts are facts. The Jewish people have inhabited the land of Israel since before the birth of Jesus. There are 6 billion people in the world and fewer than 13 million Jews left. If there had been no Holocaust, there would be 100 million Jews in the world. Now there are fewer than 6 million left in their historic homeland — the Land of Israel.

Will we do more to save the spotted owl than we will the last remaining Jews in their natural habitat?! The Jews are an endangered species who deserve the world's protection and not their persecution. To hear Iran, Hamas or many other groups tell their side of the story, the Jews would have been wiped from this earth a long time ago.

My recent Pundits Blog essays on Moshe Feiglin and Manhigut Yehudit (Jewish Leadership) as a rising political phenomenon in Israel have brought much interesting mail and commentary. To the neurosis that has crippled forward progress in an Americanized Israel at least since 1993, highlighted now by the Gaza incident, a singular soldier with a moral compass like Feiglin’s brings clarity. He calls for Israel to be a religious state: “a Jewish state” instead of “a state for Jews.”